January 2008

January 31, 2008

I posted before about making a magic object to help you with your creativity and work, but today I was thinking about all the magic in the objects already around us. Not every object has the same amount of magic, but you know the ones that are meaningful to you. Maybe it's something a friend gave you to remember them by or a trophy of some great success in your life or a picture of you with a famous person. You know the kinds of things I'm talking about. Generally they have a low dollar value, but you'd miss them the most if they were gone.

What if these things had real Harry-Potter-Lord -of-the-Rings magic powers? That handkerchief you took from your grandmother's house the day she died. Would it have healing powers? Would it protect you from demons? Would it make cookies appear whenever you wanted one?

The connection between the magic of these items and their powers is the root of the energy of metaphor that powers everything you create. Their meaning is part of you and examining them is like being able to look at yourself from the outside.

So, find that cigar box of mementos you keep or dust off your nick knack shelf and go through them one by one. Hold them in your hand and ask yourself what spell it would cast if it could? What power does it contain?

This is the raw force of creativity at work, the discovery of connections between seemingly disconnected objects and yourself. You'll get a better understanding of your needs and wants and emotional underpinnings.

What do you keep? What does it mean?

In fact, why limit it to what you own? Look at other objects in the world and ask what magic powers they would have. A pair of Houdini's handcuffs or a handwritten page from one of Shakespeare's plays or a piece of the Berlin wall? It all has power inside and recognizing it will allow you to control it.

Plus it's fun. So, even if you get nothing from it, you'll have a good time. Oh, and they don't really have magic powers, so don't get any bright ideas that your grandfather's walking cane can really make you invisible. It's just that your grandfather made you feel invisible when you were around him because he was such a powerful man. You can't walk around naked in public just because you're holding a cane.

January 28, 2008

Automatic writing has an interesting history. The name contains what it is, just sitting down and writing without trying to influence what comes out with ideas about meaning or story or spelling or even being interesting. It seems to have started with spiritualism, as a means of contacting the dead in the afterlife, in the 1800s. The spiritualist movement was really about women trying to have positions of power in a society that limited them.

So, automatic writing served two purposes. One, the person doing the automatic writing could pretend that the writing was coming from somewhere outside themselves. Two, other people would take it more seriously because they thought the women were just a means for the message to be communicated. By removing the idea of authorship from the writing, both the writer and reader were free to judge the writing for what it was rather than prejudging its source.

The next group to use it were the surrealists who also did automatic drawing. They believe it was a channel to the "genius of creativity" in all of us. Also, they were attracted to the strange images and rhythms it produces.

I don't think automatic writing is a message from another world or the key to your subconscious mind, but it is a useful tool for producing raw material.

Here's a short guide on how to do it.

Find a comfortable place to sit with a flat surface in front of you. Get a pen or pencil and some blank paper. Clear your head, go neutral, then begin writing as fast you can. If you find yourself stopping, just use the last letter of the last sentence you wrote as the first letter of the next sentence and keep going. Don't stop to correct, alter or insert a better idea, this is simply a big dumping ground for you to produce raw material that you can use for whatever you want later.

Write as long as you want, you'll know when it's over.

I recommend putting it aside for a day before reading it. It can be a revelation or a complete disappointment, it doesn't matter because you didn't put any effort into it.

Try it. I promise you'll be entertained. If you feel better pretending that you are channeling a voice from somewhere else, go ahead. That way you don't have to take the blame for what happens. If you decide to do that, you can pretend you are channeling the voices of aliens, fairies, half-dog half-men that live in the swamps of West Virginia, David Lee Roth or President Taft. Maybe it will make it better!

January 20, 2008

Have you noticed that a lot of people who write about creativity also try to justify it with practical uses like problem solving or making money? As if creativity were the intended end product of a controllable series of actions. In fact, there are misguided "rules" for creative meetings in offices to keep them on track. Arts programs are discontinued in schools all the time as a waste of time that won't help you on standardized tests. Even as we recognize the power and importance of creativity, we negate the actual work of it.

And by work I mean play.

I want to argue for the pointless, the nonsense, the impractical and the absolutely useless. It is only through these that we reach a point where we might, at some point, come up with something beautiful or original or world enhancing. The road to a good idea is littered with thousands of terrible ideas. And by terrible ideas, I mean fun and interesting ideas that aren't what you need at just that moment.

In fact, we're taught to hide the "bad" ideas. The impractical ideas. The nonsense. To only give the ideas that we know are winners and practical solutions. These leads to boring people, afraid of change, waiting for someone else to say something stupid so they can laugh at it and feel superior.

Take some time to do something pointless and fun. Express yourself in ways that you aren't good at. Write a dirty limerick, draw, play a practical joke, write a romantic comedy or, in my case, dance. Have fun failing and you can learn to love nonsense and pointlessness. You can recognize that nonsense is sometimes the only visible part of a greater truth. That pointlessness can sometimes be a signpost to something more important.

But, I'm not going to promise anything except a good time. Play is the hard work of a good idea that seems to come in an instant. Make sure you do something every single day that makes the judgmental authority figure in your head roll his/her eyes and question your sanity. You'll never be able to prove that any of it had any worth to you, but it won't matter. Pointlessness is its own reward.

January 17, 2008

He was the lead singer of a band called Guided By Voices and is one of the most prolific songwriters of all time. Over 2,000 of his songs have been commercially released and he has a backlog that will probably still be trickling out long after he retires from music.

How does he do it? He's incredibly talented, for one thing, but there are also interesting things he does that we can mimic. I watched a documentary on him and I noticed that instead of starting with a song and then trying to find a place for it, he sometimes works backwards. He is constantly looking for song titles all around him. Interesting intersections of words that out of context could make for a poetic song, album title or band name. Then, he designs album covers with track listings for these imaginary groups. He has boxes of them in his house.

It got me thinking. Wouldn't that work for anything creative?

Couldn't you design book covers and movie posters and then make the movie they inspire? Why not write a blurb for the back cover or your own review? In fact, you can design a whole marketing campaign to help you focus and make it more real. What is the name of your gallery show? What would the commercial for it look like? What would you say when David Letterman asked you about it?

I'm betting a lot of musicians spent their high school years designing fliers and album covers for bands that hadn't written a single song. Actors spend time imagining an acceptance speech for an academy award. Sometimes it's the unimportant stuff that drives us toward the meat of creativity.

A friend of mine pointed out a cool way to make up your own band and album. (Although with slight modifications, this could give you a book title and chapters.)

My favorite is the base your success on one project. It reminds of me of a guy I knew in a creative writing program that had one "professional level" short story and wasn't going to write another until the first one sold. He rewrote it over and over again.

January 06, 2008

Grady Klein has posted a wonderful and funny comic with advice on how to survive any creative venture. In his case, it's a graphic novel, so it's titled How to Survive Writing a Graphic Novel. Visually, it's a graceful dance between the artist and his demons. My favorite bit of advice in regard to your demon is, "No matter if he is bugging the **** out of you, always listen to him. Whatever he says."

January 05, 2008

You may have read about it in Vanity Fair. In the early 80s, a group of boys in Southern Mississippi decided they were going to remake Raiders of the Lost Ark shot by shot using a video camera, their friend and whatever props and locations they could scrounge together. It took them seven years to complete. Seven years is a long time to work on something as an adult, but to a 10 and 11 year old, that's a lifetime.

I was lucky enough to attend a screening hosted by the director a while ago. The quality of the film is as rough as you would imagine a 20 year old video tape to be. Despite technical flaws, this movie is a powerful testament to what it means to be a creative nerd. If you ever wonder why people get obsessed with movies or TV shows to the point of distraction, this movie has the answer. Children from divorced families getting together to create their own fantasy world every summer while people made fun of them.

Technically, the movie has every fault you would imagine. But, those faults pale in comparison to how much they got so very very right. The giant boulder is a giant boulder, the fire in the bar scene is a fire in a bar (admittedly, a bar they built in someone's cellar) and when Indiana goes under a truck while holding onto his whip and is then dragged behind in the dust, you find yourself cheering in excitement that they pulled it off.

One of the great pleasures of the movie is watching them solve problems that don't occur to the casual viewer. You wonder how they'll do the boulder, what the ark will look like and how they'll pull off the chase scene. The real interest is in the tiny moments. For instance, if you are in a small town in Mississippi, where are you going to get a monkey? When the solution appears on screen, I found myself laughing not so much because it was funny, but because the solution is so clever. They just used a Beagle mutt named Snickers.

When Marion is trying to get the monkey off of her shoulder, it's just a dog trying to figure out why a girl is shaking him around. Snickers rides around on the shoulder of "the Arab" with a look of disinterest and whenever he gets put down, he immediately curls up and goes to sleep. The shot of him on the floor after eating bad dates is just him sleeping in an odd position.

The plane at the end of the first scene is replaced with a boat in a swamp. The natives that chase him there are 11 year old boys in grass skirts. Time after time they just pull it off in an obvious but tremendously clever way.

In the question and answer after the movie, someone actually had the audacity to point out what scenes and shots were missed. For a split second, I thought the audience, all awestruck at the work and creativity on display, was going to collectively hit him in the back of the head. Chris Stromopolis, the co-director and Indiana Jones, shushed the crowd and started to explain. You see, he said, for the first few years, we could only see the movie at the theater. There were no video stores and it wasn't on TV. They worked from memory and a Marvel Comic adaptation. It wasn't until 84 or 85 that they actually could compare what they'd filmed to the actual movie. At one point, they went into the theater with a tape recorder taped to their chests in the hopes of being able to get something, ANYTHING, that they could use. The first time, they were caught. The second time, they got a good tape with dialog.

The most touching moment for me was Chris telling us that scene where Marion kisses Indy in the ship's cabin is his actual first kiss from a girl and it was captured on film. Which makes me think that what started as an attempt to duplicate an action adventure movie turned, as the years passed, into an elaborate plot to get a kiss from a girl.

In the blooper reel there's a shot of a kid that they set on fire with gasoline rolling around on the floor asking if they got the shot while someone is standing off to the side trying to quickly read the instructions on a fire extinguisher.

When they tried to make a plaster cast of the kid who played the Nazi Toht's head for the melting scene at the end. You know, the weird looking torture Nazi whose face melts, well in this version he's played by a kid who looks like Ernie from My Three Sons only skinnier and nerdier. Turns out they accidentally used construction plaster instead of plain plaster, so when they put it on his head, it started to heat up to about 107 degrees. They had given him a pad of paper to write on and he wrote the word "hot." Then, they realized that they hadn't properly soaped his eyes and they were plastered shut. He reached for the pad again and wrote the word "hospital." They called an ambulance, but the police got there first. The policeman looked at the plaster coated boy, shook his head and said, "What in the hell are you kids doing?"

One store owner called the police and told them that they were filming child pornography.

Chris is now trying to turn all this attention into a career of some kind. He's been in LA for 14 years with no luck, but they might be the thing that pushes him over the edge. Their story has been sold and is going to be a movie and a documentary. Hopefully, by the grace of Lucas, this will be released on DVD so every nerd in the world can see it.
In the credits, the movie is dedicated to the memory of Snickers. He was hit by a car before the movie was complete. When an audience member asked about Snickers, Chris almost teared up and said, "Good old Snicks."

It's like watching someone's home movies, but the sheer scope and magnitude of what they pulled off makes me feel like I can do anything. The biggest lesson in all of this is that if they had only half-made the movie, it wouldn't be that interesting. Remember to finish things no matter what!